See Rolling Stone:

 

http://www.rollingstone.com/culture/pictures/fbi-adds-10th-woman-to-most-wanted-list-meet-them-all-20160630/bernardine-rae-dohrn-20160630

So do something independent—-rebel against war and empire and white supremacy and wage slavery and every form of human injustice or oppression.
The best July 4 speech ever is here:

“What, to the American slave, is your 4th of July? I answer: a day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim. To him, your celebration is a sham; your boasted liberty, an unholy license; your national greatness, swelling vanity; your sounds of rejoicing are empty and heartless; your denunciations of tyrants, brass fronted impudence; your shouts of liberty and equality, hollow mockery; your prayers and hymns, your sermons and thanksgivings, with all your religious parade, and solemnity, are, to him, mere bombast, fraud, deception, impiety, and hypocrisy — a thin veil to cover up crimes which would disgrace a nation of savages. There is not a nation on the earth guilty of practices, more shocking and bloody, than are the people of these United States, at this very hour.
Go where you may, search where you will, roam through all the monarchies and despotisms of the old world, travel through South America, search out every abuse, and when you have found the last, lay your facts by the side of the everyday practices of this nation, and you will say with me, that, for revolting barbarity and shameless hypocrisy, America reigns without a rival.”

http://www.c-span.org/video/?410176-3/book-discussion-demand-impossible

http://www.bet.com/video/betawards/2016/acceptance-speeches/jesse-williams-receives-humanitarian-award.html

To the editors:

“Lessons and Hopes in Vietnam” (New York Times, May 24, 2016) is breathtaking in its failure to articulate a single useful lesson from the ten-year US war in Vietnam, and its failure, therefore, to offer any hope that the US will behave more wisely moving forward.

Millions of us who lived through those perilous and hopeful times concluded that the US must learn to live as a nation among nations—not the self-styled “world’s last remaining super-power,” not the uber nation playing cop to the world, and not the arrogant exception to the standards all other people must live by. We hoped the US could at long last learn that war is not the answer, and that wherever the US boot (or drone) comes down, death and destruction, displacement and devastation follow. Those lessons are playing out in front of our eyes every day.

But those are not the lessons learned by Secretary of State John Kerry, senator John McCain, and former senator Bob Kerrey, each a veteran of the Vietnam war and each deeply involved in US international policy today. Their opinion piece is a stunning mishmash of misdirection and mythology, dissembling and deception.

Misdirection: The subtitle of the piece is, “Veterans see a bright future for a country with a troubled past,” and that reference is to Vietnam, not the US. The ahistorical detachment is dazzling. “Troubled past?” Troubled by an invading army willing to commit war crimes “on a day-to-day basis with the full awareness of officers at all levels of command” as Lt. John Kerry said in1971. The US needs to face its own troubled history honestly if it ever hopes to move forward in balance and harmony.

Mythology: “We must never again confuse a war with the warriors,” they write, echoing a legend long-promoted by America-first ideologues, and oft-repeated in an attempt to silence principled opposition to the next invasion, and the next. Veterans were in fact the heart of the largest antiwar movement in US history from 1968 onward—they still are—and peace advocates made a hard distinction then (and now) between the troops who were overwhelmingly African-American and working class, and the powerful masters of war who sent them into harm’s way from the safety of their conference rooms.

Dissembling: They write that “with sufficient effort and will, seemingly unbridgeable differences can be reconciled.” They would have us believe that what we have here, as the warden says repeatedly in “Cool Hand Luke,” is “a failure to communicate.” In reality, when the gun boats and war planes arrived, no amount of effort would resolve the fact that the Vietnamese did not want to be occupied by the US or any other foreign power.

Deception: “Our leaders need to be honest with Congress and the American people,” they write, without a nod in the direction of the ongoing creation of a massive secret surveillance state organized by the CIA and the NSA. They add that the US should “exercise humility in assuming knowledge about foreign cultures,” once again, without a word about the destruction of Afghanistan, Libya, Yemen, Syria, Pakistan, and Iraq. The resultant pain and suffering, the massive refugee crisis throughout Europe and the world, are fresh reminders that a key lesson from the Vietnam war that these former fighters ignore is that wars are a leading cause of forced global migration.

The Vietnam war included the deaths of 6000 people a week—mostly civilians, and including women and children—for ten long years. The lessons Kerry, McCain and Kerrey draw from that catastrophe are anemic at best.

William Ayers

Chicago, IL

Michael Ratner’s Palestine Legacy

May 20, 2016

He came to Cuba often. The last time was in February 2015, on the
occasion of the International Book Fair in which the Spanish
edition of “Who Killed Che? How the CIA Got Away with
Murder” was presented. It was the result of painstaking
research and more than ten years demanding access from relevant
authorities to official documents jealously hidden.
The work of Michael Ratner and Michael Steven Smith proved beyond
doubt that the murder of Ernesto Guevara was a war crime
committed by the US government and its Central Intelligence
Agency, a crime that does not have a statute of limitations,
although the authors are on the loose in Miami and flaunt their
cowardly misdeed.

We met again in July on the occasion of the reopening of the
Cuban Embassy in Washington. We were far from imagining that we
would not meet again. Michael Ratner looked healthy and showed
the optimism and joy that always accompanied him. On that
occasion we celebrated that the Cuban Five anti-terrorist Heroes
had returned home and also the fact that President Obama had had
no choice but to admit the failure of Washington’s
aggressive policy against Cuba.

Michael was always in solidarity with the Cuban people since as a
very young person he joined the contingents of the Venceremos
Brigade. That solidarity remained unwavering at all times. His
participation in the legal battle for the freedom of our
comrades, including the “amicus” he presented to
the Supreme Court on behalf of ten Nobel Prize winners, was
decisive.

A tireless fighter, for him no cause was alien. He stood always
on the side of the victims and faced with courage, even at the
risk of his life, the oppressors who dominated that judicial
system. He also did it with rigor, integrity and love. More than
a brilliant legal professional, he was a passionate fighter for
justice.He was present in 1968 at the Columbia University strike
before completing his studies, and fought racial discrimination
together with the NAACP. Soon after graduating he represented the
victims of the brutal repression at the Attica prison. Thus he
began a remarkable career –impossible to describe in just
one article– which knew no borders: Nicaragua, Haiti,
Guatemala, Palestine, a never ending list.

When nobody did, he undertook the defense of the hostages in the
illegal naval base in Guantanamo. He convened more than 500
lawyers to do so –also for free– and achieved an
unprecedented legal victory with a decision by the Supreme Court
recognizing the rights of the prisoners.

Many other cases absorbed his time and energy, working in a team,
without necessarily appearing in the foreground. He did not
hesitate, however, to legally prosecute powerful characters like
Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton and George W. Bush whose
“impeachment” he tried very hard to obtain.

He also accused Nelson Rockefeller, when he was governor, and
more recently Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. He published
books and essays in favor of legality and human rights. He was
considered one of the best American lawyers and chaired the
National Lawyers Guild and the Center for Constitutional Rights
and founded Palestine Rights. He combined his work as a litigator
with university teaching at Columbia and Yale and helped train
future jurists able to follow his example.

He was the main defender of Julian Assange and Wikileaks in the
United States. An insuperable paradigm of a generation that aimed
for the stars, he was an inseparable part of all their battles
and will remain so until victory always.